“Uncle Sam, let
me in!” According to my mother’s oft repeated story through childhood and
youth, I coined that phrase in the U.S. Immigration Office at the Sumas, Washington border crossing in April of 1929. My
parents had just been refused re-entry into their original promised land after
trying to persuade officials to relent because my slightly older sister and I had
been born there. I tried to console them with the threat that when I grew up I would
return to that place to insist on my rights as an American born citizen.
So, insult added
to injury, on the family’s return to our temporary home and reporting to Canadian
Customs on the Huntingdon side of the border when questioned on the reason for
their crossing to Sumas, they were informed that if their 1924 Studebaker was
to stay in Canada, a duty on the value of the vehicle had to
be paid. If they couldn’t raise the cash it had to be returned to Huntingdon
for impoundment.
The old man’s
memories of that event some 84 years ago returned after his recent viewing of
the new Ken Burns photo story called The
Dust Bowl. The many photos and stories going back to the twenties and
thirties forcefully reminded me of my own family’s experiences, told as part of
my parents’ story, A Family Diaspora,
a book I self-published in 1997. In
the chapter I called Footloose and
Rootless in America I recounted the then personal memories, writings,
family photos and other records which I thought then were exhaustive, provided
by my siblings and myself. Some of my conclusions were in error as I discovered
later.
In this issue I
won’t go into the family travels from Russia to Germany, thence to the American arrival at New York’s Ellis Island and the arrival at Halstead, Kansas in December 1922. Their sponsors and bank
loan guarantors were Mom’s American Schmidt cousins. That respite lasted four
years during which Mom was the centre of attention in that community and
thought she had achieved the American Dream. Dad worked in the flour mill, paid
off the travel indebtedness, acquired a Model T touring car and seemed to be
thriving.
In 1926, for
reasons still unclear to me, the family packed up an old Model T truck piloted
by Dad and the car driven by my then 13 year-old brother with the rest of the
family, including me as a foetus, along gravel roads, camping and working our
way through Idaho for a parcel of land in Coeur d’Alene County, Washington,
where I was born. That lasted but briefly, and with money and cars gone, we
answered an ad for farm help by an Ohio Pennsylvania Dutchman who advanced rail
fare for the family. He turned out to be a boorish bachelor type with very
unpleasant household habits and aggressive goats that considered the house part
of their territory, so that ended in favour of taking over a share-cropping
arrangement in the Archbold, Ohio area.
They must have
had a kindly landlord, because they did well enough to preserve most of their
chattels. Incredible to me, that included tools and belongings dragged along through
all the trials and tribulations from Russia as well as a Phoenix treadle sewing machine Mom purchased in Germany for fifty cents American sent by the
American cousins in 1922.
In Archbold, Ohio, my brother, aged 14 in June 1927 had been used by
the non-driving landlord as the driver of a new Buick the man bought that year.
Somehow, likely with the Buick owner’s backing my brother engineered the
purchase of a used 1924 Studebaker sedan within the next year. He loved that
car and the sound of its authoritative aah-ooh-aah
horn, often lording it over the pip-squeak beeps
of the Model T’s he passed.
As they had done
for centuries, the Russian Mennonites kept in touch by letter throughout their
communal wanderings. During this Ohio period, Mom heard from her much older sister and her
husband. They had somehow made it to Canada during what was by then the Stalinist
crackdown, and eventually made their way to a new Mennonite community in Canada’s Fraser Valley. They extolled its rain-forest virtues and
the possibilities for a new Russian style religious village community just
begun in 1928. With summer harvest done, without thought about citizenship
status or border crossings, the family packed all chattels and family in and on
the 1924 Studebaker and started out Okie-style (a term not yet invented then)
to freeload, camp and work their way to the new village promise but still
looking along the way for alternative places where the family might settle in a
genial community all grown up family members could agree on.
Remember 1928 was
still part of the Roaring Twenties.
Americans were getting rich on the stock market and Herbert Hoover campaigned
to succeed Calvin Coolidge that year with the slogan, a chicken in every pot and a car in every garage. That must have
seemed a very empty promise to my family as we rough travelled through the
country looking for work and a home.
One of our stops
along that way was a grassland farm at Montezuma, Kansas. One of Dad’s former World War 1 Siberian
internment fellows by the name of Miller had settled there perhaps a year
earlier. The location is not that far from the Oklahoma Panhandle in Western Kansas, considered in the Ken Burns photo story
to be the centre and worst part of the Dust
Bowl. According to that story, the grassland farmers had bumper crops in
both 1928 and 1929, and I suspect my family stopped as Miller guests for a time
and perhaps considered settling there. My oldest sister left snapshots of the
youngest children, including me eating an apple, and the one of the Studebaker,
inserted here appearing generally unloaded and with mud on the tires. The
people around the car show a young gallant in double breasted suit, likely a
Miller son, eyeing my twelve year-old sister behind the car, my brother Henry
at fifteen left of the driver’s door, Miller with foot on running board and Dad
leaning against the back of the car.
From Southern Kansas the search went west through even more
arid States to California and north to British Columbia. Our well laden, well travelled 1924
Studebaker caravan eventually reached the Canadian Border at Huntingdon, BC on December 7, 1928, almost six years to the day after my
parents and their three surviving Russian born children were admitted as
immigrants to the States at Ellis Island in 1922.
My family’s
arrival at this new “promised land” in the Fraser Valley did not improve our lot. Relationships
between my parents, between parents and my older siblings, and between all
family members and the church community worsened. Reasons and speculations on
the causes of this downward spiral are covered in my Diaspora volume, but the arrival here could not have been well
blessed, as the following highlights may indicate:
- The family must
have applied to return to America within 3 months after their arrival because
the family documents included a letter from the U.S. Commissioner of
Immigration dated April 6, 1929 at Sumas, Washington stating in the first
paragraph: “With reference to examination
of yourself and family at this office on April 2, 1929, and especially with
reference to your appeal from the decision of the Board of Special Inquiry,
denying you and your family admission to the United States, as the charge that
yourself and family were likely to become public charges was made subject to
reopening and as it is desired to clear up all doubtful points before the case
is submitted to Washington, DC for final determination, you are requested to
submit to this office, at your earliest convenience, proof of such money or
other resources as you claim to own.” There were further requirements as
well but of course proof of resources was not forthcoming.
- Our beloved 1924
Studebaker was impounded by Canadian Customs pending payment of 27.5% Duty on
the value and a 5% Excise Tax on value and duty added together, for a total
bill of $124.43. The family scrimped and saved and got it released on payment
of that amount on October 18, 1930. It was in use sparingly for a year or two
after that but sat on blocks in our barn/garage shed through the rest of the
Depression, much beyond our means to operate. I spent many an hour sitting
behind the wheel in the closed shed in useless fantasy.
- In their six
years in the States, no matter how strict the family discipline and religious
observance may have been, my three Russian born siblings, in early or mid-teen
years could not be under constant supervision. In all their scrambles around
the country they were the main communicators for my parents who had learned but
little English during those years. The kids spoke American English by then
without the tell-tale Mennonite accent, which I recognize to this day in Canada
even in some public figures of perhaps third generation Russian Mennonite
families. From stories my older siblings have told, especially my brother, I am
certain that my parents were totally unaware of the many shenanigans they got
up to, constant work demands notwithstanding.
- Through the
Depression, my village theocracy grew. Many of the refugees from Stalinist
atrocities by way of church guaranteed travel expenses had settled on the
Canadian prairies, generally on grasslands granted to the CPR as part of the
trans-continental railway construction deal. They soon suffered the same kind
of drought, crop failures, and grasshopper plagues as the Burns Dust Bowl film describes. They left for
greener pastures in Yarrow, my village theocracy, arriving from Mennonite area
towns like Herbert, Beechy, Rosthern and Coaldale. We called them prairie chickens and soon the back road
parcels of Yarrow were dotted with new shacks. Yarrow became a thriving German
speaking community and soon filled the original Mennonite Brethren Church to
overflowing. Under the strict leadership of the Rev. Johannes Harder the place
indeed became a tightly knit village theocracy.
- The Harder story is
told in a biography by Saskatchewan Professor Dr. Regehr titled A Generation of Vigilance. I reviewed
the book from a personal memoir point of view in an April 2010 issue of The Old Man’s Post. It was obvious,
though, that the Nickel family, with its earlier American arrival history and
the freedom our teen children experienced there, did not quite fit in. The
differences can be exemplified by one experience. One warm summer day my two
older sisters walked along the central road in the village wearing short
sleeved dresses. They were stopped and accosted by one of the church elders, publicly
accused of indecency by appearing on the street as ladies of the night and advised
to change their sinful ways and make their confessions to the congregation.
In spite of all
our differences in the community and the trauma they entailed for an inhibited
kid, I am forever thankful that we could not return to Kansas to partake of the American Dream. We
survived through Depression and the unpleasantness of World War 2 animus
against our German speaking village on a productive four acre patch of poorly
drained land right next to the Vedder Dyke. Though we lived long on credit for
essentials like flour and feed, I never went hungry, I always had work of some
sort to do, I had time to wander behind the dyke and along the river and to
dream of better times, to misbehave and learn bad habits and generally to
develop some sort of humanity. What more can the old man expect?
You can note that
by the time I had to make a citizenship choice, I had become a proud Canadian,
the yen for the American Dream long dispelled. Though it is but a five minute
drive from my present home, I have never returned to the Sumas border crossing
from Canada to demand, “Uncle Sam, let me in!” And since my
Canadian Passport expired and having no plans for foreign travel I refuse to
acquire a cheaper border crossing identification card even to buy the cheaper
pharmaceutical prescriptions, gasoline or groceries offered there. I have
always preferred to buy in Canada where I have earned a living and where my
heart is.
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